The Black Sea Maritime Project (MAP)—a two-year investigation of Bulgaria’s Black Sea waters—involved local and international experts who found 60 previously lost shipwrecks spanning 2,500 years in the history of a coastline that has been port to many of Europe’s major empires. Dozens of old ships lie preserved in low-oxygen waters off the coast of Bulgaria, where ships from the Roman Empire, Byzantium and Ottoman ports once docked. The composition of the Black Sea makes it a perfect environment for preserving relics because its anoxic layer prevents the sort of damage that oxygenated water causes to wood, metals and other materials.

Months of invasions by sometimes armed semi-nomadic herders, and tens of thousands of their livestock, have had a disastrous impact on the wildlife of a region heralded as a conservation success story. African wild dogs, elephants, buffalo, lions, giraffes, zebra and antelope have all been affected by shooting, starvation and disease, or by being forced out of their usual habitats. Canine distemper, a virus most likely caught from the pastoralists' attendant mongrels, has wiped out scores of endangered wild dogs, including all seven packs studied by Ngatia, an ecologist at Laikipia's Mpala Research Centre.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Cleanups at some U.S. hazardous waste sites have stopped or slowed down because the Environmental Protection Agency does not manage its Superfund staff effectively to match its workload, an internal government watchdog said Tuesday.

Vice President Mike Pence pressed Myanmar’s military to end its violent campaign against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority and urged the U.N. Security Council to respond forcefully to the resulting humanitarian crisis in Southeast Asia.

Scout Schultz, a Georgia Tech student, was shot by campus police on Saturday night, and a protest two days later led to arrests. In the aftermath of those events, Yahoo Lifestyle talked to a friend of Schultz’s to gain some perspective on what happened and why.

Baruch García stood at an intersection Tuesday afternoon after a deadly earthquake, trying to direct traffic away from a road cutting through La Condesa’s lush Parque México. On the other side of the park, hundreds of volunteers – from a young boy in a yellow soccer uniform, to a woman in slacks and ballet flats, and a man wearing an apron from a nearby café – lined the street for blocks, helping to remove rubble from an eight-story collapsed building with an unknown number of people buried inside. Tuesday afternoon, a 7.1 earthquake in nearby Puebla State rocked Mexico City, some 75 miles away.

One of the defining challenges in the 21st century has been how to balance demands for independence by certain peoples with the sanctity of national borders. Just in the coming days alone, two regions with distinct identities, Catalonia in Spain and the Kurdish area in Iraq, plan to stage referendums on independence. The two votes are an echo of demands by several countries for more sovereignty to protest the perceived effects of global or regional institutions that were set up to purposely impinge on national sovereignty.

Northrop Grumman’s purchase of Orbital ATK for $7.8 billion will create a company involved in projects ranging from America’s next stealth bomber and ballistic missile system to the International Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope. The deal, previewed in news reports over the weekend and announced today, is part of a trend toward greater consolidation in the defense and aerospace industry. Virginia-based Orbital ATK itself was part of that trend back in 2014, when it was formed through the merger of Orbital Sciences Corp. and Alliant Techsystems’ aerospace and defense groups. More recently, United Technologies announced its $30 billion… Read More

When the earthquake hit, it sent panicked people running into the street but many weren't so lucky. The dust settled minutes later to reveal a landscape of flattened buildings and rubble in the heart of Mexico City.

"President Trump … said that he was sorry, and he told me that he was going to follow up on this issue,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told PBS in reference to the incident, which resulted in charges against 15 Turkish security officers.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., says Jimmy Kimmel “does not understand” the new health care legislation he and Sen. Lindsey Graham are co-sponsoring after the late-night host blasted their proposal and accused Cassidy of lying to his face.

Russia fought two bloody wars in its Caucasus republic of Chechnya, ostensibly to crush an emerging threat of Islamist extremism on its own soil. Mr. Kadyrov is imposing sharia (Islamic law) on his population – and lately, even defying the Kremlin's foreign policy – with an apparent eye on a global, Islamic stage. “He has introduced politicized Islam in Chechnya, and this is definitely a problem for the Kremlin.

An artificial muscle that can lift 1,000 times its own weight has been created, laying the groundwork for Terminator-like humanoid robots. Scientists used a 3D printing technique to create the rubber-like synthetic muscle that expands and contracts like its biological counterpart. Heated by a small electric current, the material was capable of expanding to nine times its normal size. This is a big piece of the puzzleProfessor Hod Lipson, Columbia University In tests it demonstrated enormous strength, having a strain density - the amount of energy stored in each gram of a stretched elastic body - 15 times greater than natural muscle. The device, described as a "soft actuator", was able to lift 1,000 times its own weight, said the researchers whose work is reported in the journal Nature Communications. Professor Hod Lipson, from the Creative Machines laboratory at Columbia University in New York, said: "We've been making great strides toward making robot minds, but robot bodies are still primitive. "This is a big piece of the puzzle and, like biology, the new actuator can be shaped and reshaped a thousand ways. We've overcome one of the final barriers to making lifelike robots." Artificial muscles may not only be used in robots but also sensitive surgical devices and a host of other applications where gripping and manipulation is important. Co-author Dr Aslan Miriyev, also from the Creative Machines lab, said: "Our soft functional material may serve as robust soft muscle, possibly revolutionising the way that soft robotic solutions are engineered today. "It can push, pull, bend, twist, and lift weight. It's the closest artificial material equivalent we have to a natural muscle." The long-term aim is to accelerate the artificial muscle's response time and link it to an artificially intelligent (AI) control system, said the researchers, who were part-funded by the Israeli defence ministry.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft completed its incredibly successful extended mission last week, punctuated by a fiery death at the hands of Saturn's upper atmosphere. But just before the orbiter bid farewell it captured an image of an area of Saturn's rings that scientists still can't fully explain, and it's a tantalizing glimpse at one of the planet's most puzzling features.
It's called Peggy, and it's a shifting spot on the edge of one of Saturn's rings that breaks up its otherwise perfect appearance. In photos, it appears as a bright bump, causing a disturbance in the smooth ring edge, but researchers still haven't agreed on an actual explanation for what it is or why it's there.
The feature was named for the mother-in-law of Cassini team member Carl Murray, due to its initial discovery landing on Peggy's birthday back in 2013. Speaking with Gizmodo, Murray explains the team's fascination with the odd disturbance.
“What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going? We’ve been tracking it almost ever since,” Murray says. “We’ve never actually resolved the object. All we can do is track the glitch.”
One of the early guesses was that the bumps could be the result of a moon or other large object messing with the materials in the ring, but that theory was abandoned due to the fact that the object would have to be so large it would have caused even more chaos. At the moment, the most likely alternative is that the disturbance is the result of a chunk of debris that is traveling throughout the ring, messing up its perfect appearance.
Cassini's final snapshot of the feature is the best look scientists have ever had at the glitch, and will remain so for some time. For now, the mystery will have to remain unsolved.

In this frame grab from video provided by Voice of America, members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoganâ s security detail are shown violently reacting to peaceful protesters during Erdogan’s trip last month to Washington. House Republican and Democratic lawmakers are expected to approve overwhelmingly a resolution that calls for members of Erdoganâ s security detail who were involved in the incident to be brought to justice. WASHINGTON — The White House is rejecting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s claim that President Trump said he was “sorry” for a May incident in which security personnel from Turkey attacked protesters in Washington, D.C.

A massive, glowing, Slinky-like "creature" photographed by a scuba diver off the coast of Australia has spurred intense speculation about what the mystery beast could be. Speculation swirled that the psychedelic creature was a giant pyrosome, a free-floating sea squirt made of thousands of tiny clones. But if people look closely at the video, they'll see that the mass does not have a solid exterior as those two animal types have, but is instead incredibly transparent, Helm said in an earlier blog post about squid egg cases.

A giant starfish-eating snail could be unleashed to help save the Great Barrier Reef, officials said Monday, with a trial underway to breed thousands of the rare species. Now Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) research has shown they avoid areas where the Pacific triton sea snail -- also known as the giant triton -- is present. The snails -- which can grow to half a metre -- have a well developed sense of smell and can hunt their prey by scent alone.